RG-HDP-VD: A Physics-Aware Cooperative Trajectory Planning Framework for Heterogeneous Multi-UAVs

This paper presents Regret-Guided Heuristic Decentralized Prioritized Planning with Velocity Decomposition (RG-HDP-VD), a physics-aware cooperative trajectory planning framework for heterogeneous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) relief delivery in post-earthquake, non-convex canyon environments. RG-HDP-VD addresses two prevalent failure modes: energy-inefficient congestion caused by ignoring time-varying payload dynamics, and the collapse of feasible sets due to strict arrival windows in fixed-speed planning. We construct a mass-augmented energy topology and use a mass-augmented energy-aware A* search to extract baseline physical metrics—path length, total energy, and unit-distance energy—for each UAV. Regret-Guided (RG) arbitration then quantifies the relative energy cost of waiting versus detouring at conflicts and grants right-of-way to heavy-load, high-cost platforms. These priorities are embedded into Heuristic Decentralized Prioritized Planning (HDP), which maintains a global spatiotemporal occupancy map and serializes planning to eliminate deadlocks. To satisfy tight time windows, Velocity Decomposition (VD) maps 4D temporal constraints into a 3D path-length feasible interval and is realized via an improved VD-TSRRT* sampling-based planner. In high-fidelity simulations, RG-HDP-VD demonstrates superior scalability over conventional methods, maintaining high success rates (up to 100%) in saturated scenarios, while reducing average planning time by ~45% and total system energy by 6.7%. Finally, real-world flight demonstrations using a heterogeneous quadrotor team validate the framework’s practical feasibility and robust hardware execution.